June 2017 - Testbytes Software

11 Guidelines for Mobile App Performance Testing

Posted on June 30, 2017 by tbsupadminnxtbackendacc

Performance testing services is done to provide information about apps regarding speed, stability, reliability and scalability. It also determines speed & degradation of systems with different configurations under both controlled and uncontrolled standards. More importantly, it unfolds what needs to be improved within an app before the product is launched in the market.

The General Guidelines for Performance Testing
The methodology for software performance testing can vary in different steps, but the objective of the whole process remains the same. The following are the list of general guidelines for performance testing of mobile apps:
1) Plan for Test: Once we are ready for a test, we need to have a proper planning and check for available resources. The performance test plan should describe the overall strategy for testing the complete mobile app.
2) Identification of Testing Environment: While testing, it is important to identify the software, hardware, tools and network configurations. This will allow the design and development team to identify the performance test errors at an early stage.
Different types of testing environment:
a) Replica of production system
b) Actual production system
c) Production system with less number of servers of low specifications
d) Production system with less number of servers of same specifications
3) Define Necessary Formats for Displaying System Usage: Necessary formats need to be defined for measuring the performance of an application. Some of the possible formats are:

Task Distribution Diagram: This gives information on the number of users for a particular process and the time taken to load. The peak and off usages are determined through this.
Transaction Profile Sheet: This provides information about the transaction names, a summary of a number of transactions at a particular point of time, screen navigation, etc.
User Profile Diagram: This depicts the user load time and pages accessed by the users

4) Deciding what to test first: The following are some criteria for decision-making about which process to be tested first. It is a very important step as it guides the total performance testing process.
·         Processes having the highest business risks are tested
·         Processes that are most frequently used are tested
·         Applications’ peak usage hours of the day are analysed
·         Peak days of the month, quarter, and year
·         Processes that are linked
·         Processes which are resource intensive
5) Documenting: The purpose of documenting the process is to obtain information necessary to create virtual users such as:
·         User Actions
·         Expected results of each action
·         Input data fields
·         Valid data for input
Identifying these properties shall give a clear scope of performance test against each user action.

6) Establish which data to use: Before starting, it’s important to establish the data to be used. Any real-time data can also be imported from the development servers and the same is used to analyse results and reports.
7) Define what resources are to be tested: Performance testing involves defining the resources that are involved in testing. This includes app servers like WebSphere, Weblogic, Tomcat, IIS Server; database server like DB2, Oracle and network resources. These resources form the total system and therefore defining them is critical.
8) Performance testing should be done after functional testing: There is no question of doing performance testing when functional testing is not done. Functional testing confirms the working of the system as expected with all aspects of the UI, multilingual navigation, navigation between pages and off-site, etc.
9) Done at the time of system-testing phase: System testing is a phase of software testing in which the complete system is tested. So, performance testing should be taken up during system testing phase only.
10) Tools should be identified: There are plenty of tools available for doing performance testing. But, we need to identify tools that may be useful for system testing.
11) Execution and Communicating Results: Once the performance testing is completed, we need to summarize the findings and test results. Later, it is distributed to respective resource owners for making corrections if any.
Once the corrective measures/fixes are done, the entire tests need to be repeated and the final summary report is taken.
Conclusion
While an inclusive performance testing strategy will continue to kill bugs for all tech innovations, this will certainly help you to bring the best out of your testing efforts. With perspectives and tools emerging each day, testers need to leverage on this testing mechanism for their mobile app testing services.

How Important is Penetration Testing to Network Security

Posted on June 19, 2017 by tbsupadminnxtbackendacc

Penetration testing can create wonders for upcoming enterprises if they come up with the right solution according to the demands and blend them with the automated testing method for security expert analysis.

Penetration testing services is not just about jumping into the network security by running different steps at random, but it is about creating an organized, step by step plan that details on what, when, and how exactly are you going to do things.
How Important is Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing is an essential process that needs to be performed on a regular basis in every organization to secure the network system. Penetration testing is of different types, which include:

Network Penetration Testing
Application Penetration Testing
Wireless Penetration Testing
Infrastructure Penetration Testing

But the main problem is that many of us will have a misconception that once penetration testing is done, their systems are safe forever. Such people will never get the real benefits of this process until they follow the method regularly and will practically have to face disappointing outcomes in the future.
The need for conducting a penetration test varies according to businesses as they all work in a different way. However, the question is, what are the main benefits that a company gets from penetration testing and here we have listed a few:

Manage the Risk Factors

One of the most important benefits of pen testing or penetration testing is that it will provide you the baseline to work with the risk factors in a structured and optimal way. In this testing, the number of vulnerabilities is listed out, which is found in the target environment and also the risk factors associated with it. At first, the sequence with the highest risk is tackled and then followed to the lower ones.

Increase the Business Continuity

Business continuity is the main aim for every organization and any hurdles to this can cause a huge loss to the entire company. A breakdown in business continuity can be due to many reasons and lack of security loopholes can be one of them.
If your systems are insecure, then it might suffer more breaches. It is always important to set a stronger encryption to avoid MITM (Man In The Middle) attacks. This is because, even hackers are hired today by the rivals to stop business continuity by exploiting the vulnerabilities of the competitors to gain access to their network and also create a denial of service condition, which causes a crash in the working of the company.
3. Evaluate Security Investment
Penetration testing provides an opportunity to know about the current situation of a company and analyse the existing potential breach points. It gives us a clear idea about the entire security system and helps us to ensure whether the configuration system management has been followed properly within the company.
Such type of testing methods helps to evaluate the security investments, that is the total investment required to secure the entire network systems, what is needed, what works properly, and what does not work properly.
4. Protect your Clients, Projects or Third Parties
A vulnerability that attacks a company not only causes problems to themselves, but also to their clients, third parties and even the projects a company is handling with. However, if a company performs penetration testing regularly and takes necessary actions for security, then it will help others to have trust and confidence in that organization.

5. Guard Reputation of the Company and Maintain Public Relationships
A good public relationship and reputation are built by a company through years of struggle, regular hard work, and a large amount of investment. Even a small security issue or vulnerability attack can cause major damage to their reputation in public.
6. Help any sort of Financial Damage and avoid Fines
Simple unnoticed breaches can cause a great loss to the financial support of the company and systematic penetration testing can help you protect your organizations. Such testing keeps the major activities updated within the auditing system, which can avoid fines in the future.
7. Helps to keep a Check on Cyber Defence Capability
During the process of penetration testing, the target company should be able to identify multiple attacks and should be able to respond accordingly. The effectiveness of the protected devices like IDS, WAF or IPS can also be checked during penetration testing.
8. Performed after Deployment of New Infrastructure & Application
Pen testing should be certainly performed in companies after the deployment of a new infrastructure and application, like updating of the firmware, changes in the firewall rule, patches and upgrades to software. Because once changes happens in software performance testing, it’s easy for breaches to occur, so it is always better to keep the network secured.
9. Gap Analysis Maintenance
Pen testing/penetration testing is not a one time event, instead it should be a continual process that measures how well the entire security system performs. It also helps companies to gain awareness on gaps if any, in the system at a given point of time.
Penetration testing is necessary for any businesses that wants their network to be secure and operations to continue without any service disruption. With high-profile data vulnerabilities continuing to dominate, methods for enterprise cyber security have started to change. If you fail to test the network security and environment prior to use, it might be impossible to ensure complete security. And this is why penetration testing makes sense for organisations of all sizes.

How to Defend Against Ransomware Attacks [Infographic]

Posted on June 15, 2017 by tbsupadminnxtbackendacc

The global cyber attack by WannaCry ransomware had affected almost 200,000 organisations in around 150 countries.
But, is WannaCry one of its kind? Hardly. Ransomwares are malicious software designed to block access to a system and threatens to delete or publish the user’s data until a ransom amount is paid. Reveton in 2012, CryptoLocker in 2013, CryptoWall in 2014, Fusob in 2015-2016 are some WannaCry predecessors.

Ransomware attacks have undergone drastic changes over the years. The new variants seem to be more sophisticated, improved and more dangerous. Ransomware can encrypt machines, causing damage to important files and confidential customer information. Such operations mostly succeed because they capitalize on fear, which finally forces victims to pay the cyber criminals.
Are you concerned about your business or running in the face of an attack? Our safety checklist will help you to defend your organization against the threat of ransomware.

8 Formidable Challenges While Testing an Online Banking Application

Posted on June 13, 2017 by tbsupadminnxtbackendacc

Being the most complex and advanced enterprise solution, banking applications needs to be carefully considered in both functional as well as security aspects to ensure that customers and assets are protected from malware.

Internet-based electronic banking or online banking applications have become a necessity for customers. As a countless number of banking transactions happens every day, these apps need to have high level performance, with features that meets the needs of a customer.
Few things that should be noted to constitute a consistent, bug-free, banking application:

The app needs a solid reporting system to keep track on daily transactions
Strong auditing is required to troubleshoot issues
It should have the capacity to adhere complex and advanced work flows
Banking apps should have the feature of integration with other apps such as Trading accounts and Bill-pay utility accounts
It should possess multi-tier functionality to support multiple user sessions

In this blog, we go through the key challenges faced while testing a Banking Application:
1) Strict Security Regulation: It is necessary for banking applications to protect customer data and private information as well as the assets. Therefore, during mobile software testing, these things should be considered by providing a secure testing environment.
A banking app should be compatible with all operating systems, versions, devices etc. Along with iOS and Android, other versions including Blackberry and WP8 also need to be tested. Mobile testing tools that support both native and web properties should be used for wide usage.
To ensure that the software doesn’t have any flaws, the QA team needs to check both negative as well as positive sides of the system and report it before any unauthorized access happens. The bank should also use other security measures like an access validation code or one-time password for better safety. For security regulation testing, automation tools like HPWebInspect and IBM AppScan should be used and for manual testing- Paros proxy, Proxy Sniffer, HTTP watch etc. should be put to use.
2) Complex Data: This is one of the major challenges that can occur while testing a bank application. No apps can en sure that the back-end databases of bank system will not be affected by malware or all the data within is protected. So, it is necessary that the mobile testers need to have a pool of accounts that can be used for the testing solutions.
A bank definitely needs to have an automation tool to constantly check database connectivity and logical functions. It should be done over the virtual private network (VPN) to assure safety on its private data.
3) Active Support of Devices: About 80% of people spend their time on using mobile applications. Mobile manufacturers introduce new features on a daily basis to provide customers a better and friendly user experience. Similarly, banking apps also need to bring in revisions to offer a better experience on latest devices.
4) Privacy is Essential: Privacy plays a very important role in mobile banking. This feature defines how much secure a mobile banking app is for its users. Therefore, automated testing must be done for every single update to ensure protection for all private information. It is essential for a bank to have an automated tool system that run tests periodically without the need for a software tester to manually test each function within the app.

5) Real-time Activity: Apps should have the capacity to provide real-time updates and this is more challenging when it deals with network connectivity issues.
6) Proper Testing and Development: Bugs can affect any application and this is the reason your banking app should follow proper app testing procedure. Making a banking application with user-friendly functioning and proper security checks require extensive revision and software testing.
7) Updated Market Trends: Consumer requirements and market trends keep changing invariably. Therefore, application features, usability etc. have to be revised and kept updated.
8) Performance Failures: Performance levels involve connectivity, infrastructure, and back-end integration. The transaction happening through the apps should be monitored at regular intervals. Also, Load and Stress tests must be performed regularly to ensure multiple support transactions on anytime.
Best Practices
A few best practices that will help you manage certain challenges in testing banking applications are:

A clearly defined methodology of software performance testing
Testing that encompasses the complete work flow
Testing for functionality, performance and security
Testing of the app for UX, UI, data integrity and support multiple users

Testing banking applications can be a complicated deal, but if the key methods and principles are placed right, then it can be beneficial with long-lasting advantages. The right blend of testers and processes are key factors of a successful mobile banking app.

7 Best Practices You Can Consider for Functional Testing

Posted on June 1, 2017 by tbsupadminnxtbackendacc

Testing plays a vital role in any software or application development.
Functional testing is done to test features or functionality of an application or software. All the possibilities, including failure and boundary conditions are considered in functional testing.

Any functionality is tested by providing inputs, observing its output and comparing the actual results with the expected ones. Here are some effective procedures or best practices that may come handy while you perform functional testing:
1. Collect information required to perform testing
It is important to know what is to be tested and what the plan or procedure is, for testing. The development team has information about critical user commands and processes. Collect the information and test the critical things first.
It is important to be aware of market demands for product development. Document or matrix should be prepared to link the product to the requirement and to the test cases. Matrices should be modified as per the changes in requirement.
2. Make Test plan and test cases
Planning for what should be done to perform the testing, includes goals and scope of testing, number of people, hardware and software tools to be involved in the testing and schedule of testing, and number of test cases that should be written to perform testing. Test cases are nothing but input data based on the functionality’s specification. These test cases should be arranged and ranked as per priority to reduce delay and risk. The development team should review these test plans.
3. Execute the test
Test plans and actual functionality should match to execute the test correctly. Test cases should be written in such a way that it canbe modified if necessary with the changing needs of the product. For further analysis, problems faced and its solutions can be documented.
4. Consider the automated testing
Automated testing is done to improve quality of the product or software and also to save time. The tester has to decide about what should be automated.
Automated testing is slightly costlier in short span; but, in the long run it is more beneficial for the product. Avoid performing automation on things that can be cheaply and effectively done by manual testing.
5. Manage defects with data storage system
Many people working on same functionality may result in repetition of defect reports, incorrect order of issue solving, consideration of wrong defects and much more. To avoid this, acentralized data storage system should be managed which can be referred by everyone.

The system includes standard templates for defect reporting and verifying, ranking of defects as per priority and information about the assignment of tasks. This helps in solving problemsone by one.
6. Reporting of test results
A test result report is presented in a specific format which includes summary of all test cases executed and the time taken at each stage for each feature with its status and progress. It also provides details of any new defect found during testing.
Overall, test result report should be presented in a clear and simple way for understanding of the development team.
7. Analysis
Problems and options in both testing and development can be detected during analysis. It helps in improving procedures followed in product development. Analysis is helpful to make product success.